#its so weird living at these crossroads of idealizing success and also giving little to no fucks about my life

[hebbifer]

do u ever feel like ur not doing enough :(

#i go to a UC and in just a simple art history major but everyone else around me is like #going into these super competitive and science based careers #this one girl took like 7 classes and got A's in all of them while still maintaining a job #and last quarter i barely passed the 3 classes i took with no job and a ton of free time #like??? im such a loser #i know i shouldnt be comparing but damn!!! #i also have been dealing with severe cycles of depression since highschool but like #i just feel like i should be getting better by now ya know #but i also literally do not have any goals for myself and do not feel compelled to care about my future at all #its so weird living at these crossroads of idealizing success and also giving little to no fucks about my life #anyways #i think im gonna apply to this drive thru place that sells coffee #fast paced environments have always scared me but i wanna change that! #so weird how im almost 20 but it feels like just yesterday i was still 14 in the backseat of my moms camry #im sorry i couldnt live up to ur dreams lil jen #but i promise you i'll try

[bozzworld]

In this weeks episode: I really miss games

If you’ve bothered to take the time and read some my previous posts, why? I mean, lets face it, this is not Shakespeare, its barely even English. However, IF you ended up finding yourself pandemically bored, have re-watched everything on Netflix at least twice and trying to avoid that second sleeve of tasty, tasty oreos, you may have wandered across my page and realized that I worked in games but was feeling ambivalent about it. In fact, looking back, it went much deeper than that. I had kind of lost my way creatively: not only did I not want to make games, I really didn’t want to play games. But it wasn’t just games: I stopped reading, listening to and attempting to play music, I hadn’t written for a while and I felt a little lost. 

To be clear, my creative side was never my dominant one - I will always be a scientist first and a creative second. In fact, one of the reasons that working in games attracted me so much was because it was an ideal mix of science and creativity that allowed me to work to what I think are my strengths and still satisfy the creative need within me. In the environment when I first started working on games, you lived or died by your creative problem solving. I’ll post another time about the challenges of working on the early platforms.

So here I was at a crossroads: games were all I really knew how to do and it was difficult for me to think of doing anything else. With hindsight, ironically, I’ve always kind of rolled up my sleeves and did whatever needed done which was often not actually working directly on games. A good technical director, and I’ve always felt that I am a TD even when doing things like running patent programs or been a studio COO, should look at the project they are working on and figure out what the most effective things that it is that they can do to make that project successful. Often that is not doing things directly on the game and more about looking at the game making process as a whole and seeing where there are gaps or ways to optimize the process. Its also often about the audit process: looking at designs, schedules and resources and trying to decide whether the team is setup to succeed.

I had been at EA for over 18 years and when you stay with a company that long, you fall into patterns of work. When I joined Google, it was a huge cultural shift for me: not only are they very different companies, Google is very clearly not a game company. This has both its good and bad sides, particularly when you are building a game platform, but it was healthy for me to have to work another way after been so used to EA. Frankly, I never fit in and I think that largely ended up been a good thing - I relished my outsider status and used it to steer people towards more game friendly solutions. Not that it was easy, I often felt I was reiterating the same arguments again and again, and there were a few occasions where I felt like throwing my hands up in despair, but mostly I think it improved me as a human being,

Something else weird happened while I was working at Google: I stared loving games again. There wasn’t just one thing that did it. Certainly, flying the world and seeing so many great game developers was part of it. Reawakening the part of my brain that knew how to actually make a game so I could help the Google team understand was another. I even started playing games again and, shock horror, I started finishing them (I think I have said previously I played a lot of games through my life, but rarely finished them). 

My love for games was rekindled anew but this time, we both agreed to give each other space, start as friends and see how it went. I started to get the itch. I wanted to make games again. But I was scared.